Comparative Drama

Maria Fahey’s book on Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama is part of a series entitled “Early Modern Literature in History,” whose general editors are two British scholars, Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield. Although it deals in detail with only six of Shakespeare’s plays, it is nonetheless very wide ranging, especially in its conception of metaphor, as the following analysis will attempt to show.

In her brief preface, Fahey says that her book explores “the transformative, fruitful, and potentially unruly nature of metaphorical utterances as revealed in Shakespearean drama” (xiv). Indeed it does, and Fahey begins by challenging the traditional view of metaphor as “a merely ornamental substitution of words” (xv). She is concerned, rather, with the way classical and Elizabethan rhetoricians consider “the tension inherent in metaphor between the need for difference, distance, and interchange and the need for likeness, proximity, and containment” (xv). She believes that metaphor’s dual nature “is the very source of the fecundity that generates rhetoricians’ warnings about its potential unruliness” (xv). Hence, she cites Henry Peacham’s warning against “unchaste signification” and the worry that metaphors might beget “illegitimate” meanings.

Fahey’s first chapter surveys Aristotle’s writing in Poetics and Rhetoric, and the writings of others, such as Quintilian, particularly to discern metaphor’s tendency to “stealth,” as she calls it, that is, the ways metaphor can circulate without the full awareness of the meanings conveyed by individual speakers. Those interested in theories of metaphor will doubtless find Fahey’s twenty-one-page first chapter useful in and of itself, but I will pass directly to her discussions of metaphor in Shakespeare’s plays. Her second chapter, called “Proving Desdemona Haggard: Marriage and Metaphor in Othello,” is one of the best in the book. As its title indicates, the chapter focuses primarily on the metaphor of falconry, as Othello uses it in 3.3.264–74, which Fahey quotes in full. In this speech Othello figures himself as the falconer and Desdemona as his hawk. Fahey interprets the speech in traditional fashion:

Othello’s metaphor transforms the figurative bond of marriage into the literally binding jesses, the leather bands fastened to a hawk’s legs to which a falconer’s leash could be attached. Depicting those jesses as his heart-strings, Othello reveals that he is prepared to cut out a part of himself to be rid of an adulterous wife. To “let” Desdemona “down the wind to prey on fortune,” the heartstrings tying Desdemona to Othello would be excised from Othello’s body and left dangling from her ankles.

(23)

Fahey goes on to show that Othello is not the first to use the metaphor, nor is it (as one might expect) Iago; rather, it is Desdemona herself. It is she who figures herself [End Page 448] as Othello’s falconer when in her dialogue with Cassio she says she will “watch him tame” (3.2.23). Iago also sees her as a falconer when he says Desdemona could “seel her father’s eyes up” (3.3.213). These metaphors, Fahey argues, take hold of the world of the play and ultimately have “the power to shape the perceptions upon which people act” (24). The implications are significant and can be disturbing. I shall cite only one that Fahey makes explicit: “Indeed, figuring marriage in terms of falconry … suggests that a man needs to tame his wife because she is naturally more powerful than he and naturally averse to subjugating herself to him” (28).

Fahey takes her understanding of metaphor further in her next chapter, “‘Martyred Signs’: Sacrifice and Metaphor in Titus Andronicus.” She here depends a good deal upon René Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, particularly his pronouncement that “the sacrificial process requires not only the complete separation of the sacrificial victim from those beings for whom the victim is a substitute but also a similarity between both parties” (51). Likewise, Fahey says, a metaphor’s vehicle must also be separated from the tenor for which it substitutes even as it is similar to it (51). When the distinction between sacrificial victim and community members is lost, Girard claims, a “sacrificial crisis” ensues and language itself is put in jeopardy. His theory of sacramental crisis leads Fahey to see that it “illuminates how in Titus Andronicus’ Rome distinctions between purifying and polluting break down” (53). As she notes, “In Titus Andronicus’ darkly comical stagings of sacrifice, cannibalism, and revenge, Roman religious sacrificial rituals collapse into what Tamora calls ‘cruel, irreligious piety’ (1.1.133)” (50). And therein lies the heart of this tragedy, as when “dreadful acts are performed when people are transformed by tropes into objects of revenge and attack” (63).

Pushing ahead, Fahey next tackles “Imperfect Speech: Equivocation and Metaphor in Macbeth.” She acknowledges what others have noted, that when Macbeth charges the weird sisters with equivocation, he shows that he has taken literally what turns out to be true only figuratively. Fahey recognizes that “metaphor, like equivocation, expresses something that is and is not true” (75), and she goes on to argue that metaphoric and equivocal speech in the play “ultimately emphasizes the mutual manner in which meaning is conceived, even as this mutuality is disavowed by ruling fantasies of univocal speech and absolute power, fantasies that empower and destroy Macbeth and Lady Macbeth” (75). That is, when equivocal utterances, especially metaphors, are taken for univocal and unilateral words, disaster results, as it does for the Macbeths.

In Macbeth, Fahey says, everyone, including kings, are subject to the inherently equivocal nature of language. As a result, men like Lennox and later Malcolm in England have to be careful how they address their countrymen, until they can be sure of where their sympathies lie. Fahey analyzes Lennox’s dialogue with the Lord in 3.6.1, and following, to show how caution necessarily prompts his ambiguous speech. It is, she says, the play’s clearest example of “equivocation [End Page 449] used as a technique for communicating dissent about the king while trying to avoid discovery by him and those loyal to his oppressive regime” (81). But here as elsewhere equivocation, like figurative speech, is also spoken expectantly, hoping that the auditor will recognize it as such and interpret accordingly. That is not, of course, how the witches address Macbeth; quite the contrary: they expect and hope he will take them at their word, and he does. Their speech is not prevarication; they speak only the truth, but in such a way—ambiguously—that allows Macbeth to interpret what they say as what he wants it to mean. Similarly, Duncan uses the metaphor of planting in 1.4, unaware that his metaphor can have, as it does, implications quite the opposite to what he intends (92–93). In this chapter Fahey analyzes many other instances of metaphor and ambiguity, such as the play metaphor in Macbeth’s famous speeches in act 5, to illustrate the wide nature of her topic.

“‘Base Comparisons’: Figuring Royalty in King Henry IV Part 1” is the subject of chapter 5. Fahey’s take on this play is summed up in her remark that “[i]n King Henry IV Part 1 figuring royalty with metaphors and similes that compare the prince to things other than himself paradoxically affirm his royalty as authentic, inimitable, and unmistakable” (116). Even the “base comparisons” of the tavern world (2.4.243), Fahey says—what might seem to demean royalty—are, in fact, integral to it. Puns, but not in the manner of ambiguity in Macbeth, also play a large part in establishing the dual nature of the prince, as the wordplay on “grace” in the first dialogue between Falstaff and Hal in 1.2 indicates. The play on “counterfeit” and “true prince,” which Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren discussed years ago in Understanding Drama, is another such instance, one that Fahey mentions but without reference to Brooks and Warren.

Instead, Fahey discusses at some length and with acute perception Hal’s long soliloquy at the end of 1.2. She comments on both its use of metaphor, particularly the sun and gold imagery, but also on its form. Has anyone else noticed that the soliloquy concludes with an unrhymed sonnet? Or has anyone commented that although Hal begins with “I know you all,” he does not seem to know how cowardly Falstaff and others are and prove to be in the Gads Hill episode but needs Poins to tell him? Indeed, while Hal first jokingly suggests taking a purse in his dialogue with Falstaff, it is Poins who has to talk him into the robbery, succeeding only by reassuring the prince of the fun they will have afterward with Falstaff’s fulsome lies. Fahey’s final comment is that the soliloquy’s form and figures “sanction Prince Henry’s proclamation that he is in essence a prince and that he is now ready to reveal that essence” (130). That revelation, however, does not fully appear until the Battle of Shrewsbury, after the prince, scolded by his father in 3.2, promises to be more himself.

Right at the outset of Fahey’s penultimate chapter, “‘Ears of Flesh and Blood’: Dead Metaphors and Ghostly Figures in Hamlet,” she says her reading of poison [End Page 450] in the king’s ear as a dead metaphor will not be demonstrated by uncontestable proof (140). Nevertheless, she argues, her interpretation is worth considering because it helps us to make sense of the scenes of Hamlet with the Ghost and the absence of any scripted response by Claudius to the dumb show. The latter problem, of course, was solved long ago by Dover Wilson who maintained that Claudius does not see the dumb show performed because he is distracted by entertaining his guests. But Fahey does not accept this interpretation; instead, she agrees with Stanley Cavell that that is an oversimplification. On the other hand, if the story the Ghost has told Hamlet—that Claudius killed his father by pouring poison in his ear—is a lie, then no wonder Claudius does not react to the dumb show. Or, if not a lie, exactly, then a metaphor—a lie originally told by Claudius, announced to the people of Denmark, and then related to Hamlet as a figure of speech: “The Ghost transforms Claudius’s lie about a serpent’s stinging King Hamlet into a truth about Claudius by revealing it to be a metaphor: ‘The serpent that did sting thy father’s life / Now wears his crown’ (1.5.39–40)” (148).

But then how was Old Hamlet killed? As far as I can see, Fahey does not say. She seems more interested in showing how the Ghost’s metaphor becomes literal in Hamlet’s imagination. But there is no question, as the text proves, that he was killed and Claudius was the murderer. Claudius does not respond to the dumb show, for whatever reason, but his reaction to The Murder of Gonzago is understandable if we recall, as Francis Fergusson has pointed out, that Hamlet identifies Lucianus not as brother but as nephew to the king. This thinly veiled threat to his life leads Claudius immediately to get rid of Hamlet by sending him to England to be executed. And while there is nothing metaphorical about that, Fahey finds much else in the play for her to deal with under her topic.

I will not consider in detail Fahey’s last chapter, “‘Strange Fish’: Transport and Translation in The Tempest,” since there I believe she goes still further afield in her treatment of metaphor. Her epigraph to the chapter, from Aristotle’s Rhetoric, is illuminating, however: “[I]n naming something that does not have a proper name of its own, metaphor should be used.” The chapter accordingly deals with Caliban, his nature and his name, and Triculo’s initial regard of him as a fish. More to the point is her concern for the relationship between Caliban and cannibal and the problems of translation which may derive from Montaigne’s essay on cannibals, which Shakespeare may have read in Florio’s translation. But I hope enough has been said in the discussion of the foregoing chapters to show how provocative Fahey’s book is—yet another addition to the growing scholarship on the subject of metaphor. [End Page 451]